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This week, The WorldPost hosted a book party in Los Angeles for CNN's Fareed Zakaria as part of the launch of his new treatise, "In Defense of a Liberal Education." He is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.
Attendees included, among many others, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, financiers Steve Schwarzman, David Bonderman and Mohamed el-Erian, California State Senator Bob Hertzberg, former California Governor Gray Davis and Hollywood producers Brian Grazer, Lawrence Bender and Mike Medavoy. Economist Nouriel Roubini, essayist Pico Iyer and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson also attended. Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban sparred with Zakaria over the rights of Palestinians and the future of Israel as a democratic state.
Jack Miles, editor of the "Norton Anthology of World Religions," writes in The WorldPost this week that America is losing in the Mideast because its foreign policy has been technology-focused (drones, etc.) instead of humanities-focused (history, religion, etc.). (continued)

Philanthropist and investor George Soros warned Thursday that ethnic tensions and a lack of tolerance threaten economic and political progress in Myanmar, a country to which Soros has devoted more than two decades of attention and philanthropy.

The Greater Europe project, which many politicians, experts and opinion makers from many European countries have been trying to promote since mid-1980s, now looks like a fantasy completely detached from reality. Neither Russia nor Europe can afford a new "Cold War."

"The wretched of the earth," in Frantz Fanon's famous phrase, are on the move as migrants. Mostly, they have headed north across scorching deserts and menacing seas to follow their dreams of escaping poverty and finding a better life. As the writer Carlos Monsivais once quipped, "Los Angeles is the heart of the Mexican Dream."
Now, as we see at both the U.S. border and European shores, migrants are also fleeing north in the rusty holds of doomed ships from Libya or the "La Bestia" death train from Central America to evade the nightmares of civil war, brutal Salvadoran street gangs or merciless Mexican drug cartels. (continued)

In the next election, I fully expect to see our first woman president. But after that, I think we should break another glass ceiling. It's time to put a non-human in the White House. We're America. We don't settle for second-best.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes the state of affairs in the Republican Party today more than the estrangement of James Baker from the Republican establishment. Nothing because, for what seems like decades, James Baker was the Republican establishment.

Since Earth Day, which will be marked on April 22, was first commemorated 45 years ago, we have learned a lot about the planet's ecology. Above all, we have begun to understand the biological intelligence of nature itself that, for millennia, has managed to continually regenerate and stabilize that narrow band of a livable climate that has enabled our species and others to thrive.
Working with nature, not against it, to combat climate change is the message of the Leo DiCaprio-narrated short video documentary, "Restoration," we publish this week. As senior Chinese diplomat Wu Jianmin writes from Beijing, we are also learning to work together as nations through geo-environmental cooperation, as exemplified by the recent U.S.-China agreement to jointly reduce carbon gases. (continued)

MOSCOW -- If leaders had "de-Sovietized" the country in the 1990s, it would be clear to what Russia could now return -- namely, to its age-old traditions that predated the Soviet era. But as for Ukraine, a country that first achieved statehood only in the 20th century, what can it return to now?

Russia announced that it is going to begin selling Iran its s-300 missile defense system. This ends the ban that was placed in 2010 as part of the sanctions the United Nations imposed on Iran. The s-300 is a ground to air system that can shoot down planes or missiles. This is no small matter.